"In our society, it is not unusual for a Negro to experience a sensation that he does not exist in the real world at all. He seems rather to exist in the nightmarish fantasy of the white American mind as a phantom that the white mind seeks unceasingly, by means both crude and subtle, to slay." ("An American Dilemma: A Review," Shadow and Act)
This quote from Ralph Ellison's review of Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal's book An American Dilemma (which explores the roots of prejudice and racism in the U.S.) anticipates the premise of Invisible Man: Racism is a devastating force, possessing the power to render black Americans virtually invisible.
Hailed as a novel that "changed the shape of American literature," Invisible Man traces the nightmarish journey of its unnamed narrator from his high school and college days in the South to his harrowing experiences in the North as a member of the Brotherhood, a powerful organization that purports to fight for justice and equality for all people but in reality exploits blacks and uses them to promote its own political agenda. By describing one man's lifelong struggle to establish a sense of identity as a black man in white America, Ellison illustrates the powerful social and political forces that conspire to keep black Americans "in their place," denying them the "inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" guaranteed to all Americans. (As numerous historians have pointed out, the U.S. Constitution explicitly excludes black Americans, who, until 1865, were perceived not as men, but as property.)
